We Were the Mulvaneys (38 page)

When Patrick spoke of such matters to Professor Herring, in Herring's office in Lydall Hall, the elder man regarded him with bemused eyes. Frequently, he interrupted Patrick to ask him questions which Patrick fumbled to answer—“That's one of the things I want to know.” Herring was a vigorous man of middle age, with a reputation in the department for caprice and cruelty, for exploiting disciples who eagerly did scut-work for his protégés among the younger faculty; but he was a brilliant man, generously funded by the National Science Foundation and by the university, known to be remarkably kind to certain of his students, foreign as well as American, but all young men, whom he treated virtually like sons. For three years, Patrick Mulvaney had been a favored undergraduate of his. He'd arranged for Patrick to receive summer research grants, work-study grants, he'd written a surely strong letter of recommendation for Patrick, for graduate school; he'd given hum consistently high grades of course, while singling him out at times for harsh criticism. “You can do better than this, Mr. Mulvaney.
You
can do better,” he'd said. And so Patrick did better, without fail. He was grateful to Herring, admired Herring beyond any of his other professors, but he was uneasy in the man's presence. As he was uneasy in the presence of all older strong-willed outspoken and physically robust men who reminded him of his father.

It's basically an uneasy position, to be grateful to an elder. Patrick wasn't sure he liked that position at all.

As Patrick spoke, at what would be their final conference, in January, Herring appeared to be listening with a growing air of discomfort. Patrick had turned up at Herring's office with a sheath of unnumbered sheets of paper covered in close-typed paragraphs and equations, diagrams, and graphs; he was unshaven, eye red-rimmed and gritty from lack of sleep. He'd rushed ahead on a new subtopic before he'd discussed, with Herring, the chapter he'd handed in the previous week. (He could see his earlier work, marked in red, on Herring's desk, waiting to be returned to him. Oh but what did he care about
that
, he'd all but forgotten
that
.) Patrick's reading in mathematical game theory was enormously exciting to him and he was floundering and flailing like a drowning man but—game theory was the key, he was sure! Joining Darwin and John von Neumann and John Maynard Smith—he was sure! Why is it that there exist organisms so similar in design to other organisms they're virtually indistinguishable from them, yet have wholly different DNA? What of the role of mass extinctions in evolution? What is the relation of “natural selection” to “adaptation”? Above all—how could life, which is highly complex biochemical activity, ever have arisen out of nonlife, which is chemical simplicity?
What sense does that make?

Patrick's voice echoed in the large, high-ceilinged space of Herring's office. The walls of the office were lined with bookshelves and several garishly painted, tusked and black-haired African tribal masks. Eyeless, the masks gazed at Patrick with expressions of mild incredulity. What are you saying! How dare you speak like that!
What sense does it make?
Stricken with embarrassment, Patrick was reminded of the tale that made the rounds at their high school, that Marianne had put up her hand in biology class and asked Mr. Farolino why did God make parasites?

Professor Herring was pushing Patrick's last-week's chapter in his direction across his desk, a signal that the conference was over. The new chapter lay on a corner of the desk, yet untouched. Annoyed yet managing to smile, in an almost kindly voice, as one might speak to a bright, impetuous twelve-year-old, he said, “Why do you assume, Patrick, that there is ‘sense' to be ‘made' of any of this? Still more, that you're capable of making it?”

Next day, Patrick was notified by a departmental secretary that he'd been assigned a new thesis advisor. A white-haired associate professor whose speciality was philosophy of science, one of the “popular” lecturers whom the serious scientists in the department scorned.

 

Help me! Help—

One night in early April, fifteen days before he planned to drive to Mt. Ephraim to confront Zachary Lundt, Patrick woke terrified from a nightmare of—what? Quicksand dragging at his legs, seething steaming black muck, getting into his nose, his mouth! Into his eyes! He leapt from bed, stumbled and fell, his heart pounding. He was sobbing like a child.
No, no—help!—what is it!—leave me alone—
He'd confused his damp twisted bedclothes with black muck. Yet it seemed his bed
was
black muck. Liquidy as melted tar, roofing tar, the tar his dad used, yet living, a living organism, seething and sucking at Patrick Mulvaney greedy to pull him down inside it.

He switched on his bedside lamp with shaking fingers. Stared at the alarm clock not registering the time at first—4:35
A.M.
And rain. Rain blown against his windows, a chilly draft from the window now that it was April and Patrick had removed the masking tape he'd been using as insulation. Now it was officially nearing spring, the landlord at 114 Cook was more grudging with heat; Patrick's room was as cold as if it were winter. Yet he'd been sweating in his sleep, in such terror of being suffocated. He wiped at his eyes imagining lashes were stuck together with black muck. Christ, how disgusting!

It must be nerves, that was all. Yet Patrick was certain he hadn't any nerves, really. His plan for the
execution of justice
was complete except for a few minor details. Nothing could deter him.

He'd vowed he'd be willing to trade his life, if necessary, in order to
execute justice
against his sister's rapist. Nothing could deter him.

Patrick went out into the bathroom in the hall, used the toilet and splashed handfuls of cold water onto his face. There were his eyes, finely threaded with blood, seemingly enlarged without his glasses, regarding him in the splotched mirror above the sink. Were those the eyes of a twenty-one-year-old capable of murder? Patrick smiled at himself saying, “Yes. Right.”

It served him right, he'd had a nightmare. Boasting to Judd earlier that night how well he'd been sleeping lately. How deep and restful his sleep. He wasn't even thinking of his goddamned academic work he'd let slide, classes he'd ceased attending. He'd been provisionally accepted into the Cornell Ph.D. program in biology, depending of course on his final grades; he'd missed the deadlines, or lost the application forms entirely, for admission to the University of Chicago, the University of Michigan, Berkeley and one other where Herring had, last fall, encouraged him to apply. But he didn't lose any sleep over any of this. Nothing could deter him.

Judd had said, maybe not meaning to be insolent but it struck Patrick that way, “Lucky you.”

Patrick flared up at once. “Hey kid, if you want to back out of this, go right ahead. I can do it alone.”

Quickly Judd said, “No! I'm in it one hundred percent.”

“Just let me know, if you're afraid.”

“I
am
afraid, sure. But I'm in it one hundred percent.”

“If you don't trust I can do this right. If you're having second thoughts.”

“Hey P.J.,
no
.”

“Forget that ‘P.J.' crap!” Patrick said. He'd meant to make a joke, a species of joke only another Mulvaney would get, for its daringly mutinous tone, but his voice was quavering. He went on, hurriedly, in the schoolboy-pedant style he'd developed at the Mulvaney kitchen table, impressing his family with his precocious ways, even as he'd made them laugh, “We didn't get legal justice. We couldn't. Dad tried, and failed. Because the legal justice system is just a social institution, and it's inadequate as an expression of morality. The way of ‘legal justice' is to apply to a third party elevated above the ‘victim' and the ‘perpetrator' and their respective families and sanctioned by the people—the State. The State administers justice. But who
is
the State? Just more people. Specimens of Homo sapiens. And why should these specimens be elevated over others? Why should we grant to strangers a moral authority beyond our own? I've given a lot of thought to this, Judd. I'm not acting impulsively. Always at the back of my mind I see Marianne—abused, vilified, exiled
even by her family
. Like we're some primitive tribe, for Christ's sake! Like our sister has become a carrier of taboo! It's ridiculous, it's intolerable—
I won't tolerate it
. I'm not a Christian any longer but by God I'm a Protestant—a rebel.
I'll execute my own justice, because I know what it is.
” Patrick paused, embarrassed at the passion of his speech. Such talk, aimed at his kid brother. “Judd? Hey, sorry—are you still there?”

Judd must have been moved by Patrick's high-flown words. He said, quietly, “I'm always here, Patrick. Count on me.”

 

Back in his apartment Patrick stood for a while at his window, fearful of returning to bed. The sheets would be damp and twisted, smelling of animal panic. That unmistakable sweat-smell. He thought of Judd, a casualty too of Zachary Lundt's rape of Marianne. The poor kid stuck at High Point Farm in its waning, disintegrating days. He and Mike had cleared out, and Marianne was exiled, and Judd, the baby of the family, was left behind. In the past several months, in these nighttime telephone conversations, Patrick had grown closer to Judd than to anyone else in the world—except, maybe, Marianne. (He loved Marianne intensely. But with Marianne you didn't speak directly, couldn't speak the kind of truth a brother could speak to another brother.)

Strange: growing up with Judd, Patrick hadn't taken him seriously. Almost, he'd never looked at him. A kid brother is just someone who's
there
. Difficult to think of a kid brother as an individual with a life, his own secret thoughts, motives. But now, at the age of sixteen, Judd wasn't a child any longer and he'd become Patrick's friend and ally. Patrick liked him—very much. And respected him for his integrity and courage. Respecting a kid brother—what a novelty!

Yet Patrick wondered if, living together at High Point Farm, face-to-face, always, as in any family, competing for the attention of their father and mother, they'd be capable of such frankness and intimacy as the telephone allowed.

Sitting now at his desk, papers shoved aside. Head, which ached dully, in his hands. Jesus, what a close escape. Almost suffocated in that black muck. It had been, possibly, tar—molten tar—the tar he'd worked with, summers, on Dad's roofing crews. (What grueling, demeaning work. Laboring like slaves, for hourly wages, bare-backed on roofs.) But it was also, he seemed to see, a bog—a bog off Route 58, going toward Yewville. That dismal swampy area where a shallow creek emptied into the Yewville River north of Mt. Ephraim. Cattails and jungle vines and those brilliant purple wildflowers—phlox? loosestrife?—grew there in profusion in summer but most of the trees had been dying for years, as the water table rose, bark peeling off their trunks in tatters. At any hour of the day patches of sickly mist hovered over the bog. There was a pervasive odor of rot, of sewage. Just possibly, raw hog sewage seeped into the bog from a large corporate farm a few miles away. As a boy Patrick had never explored the bog, nor had anyone he knew. It was much too far to have bicycled to, from High Point Farm. Even in bright sunshine it retained a look of sinister desolation. In warm weather it was teeming with birds, frogs, water snakes, insects—microorganisms in unfathomable numbers. Now, in April, in the spring thaw, the liquidy black muck would be stirring into life after its long winter hibernation.

“Jesus!”—Patrick shuddered, feeling a pang of nausea. He rubbed, rubbed, rubbed his eyes where something was sticking to his lashes.

H
e won't want it, maybe? This is just to test me?

Noon of April 16, the Saturday before Easter Sunday 1979, the brothers met at the spot Patrick had designated: an unpaved stretch of Stone Creek Road, near a railroad embankment, ten miles east of Eagleton Corners. The area was mainly scrubland, no houses. In deer-hunting season men in fluorescent-orange hunters' dickeys came in carloads to prowl through the woods but it wasn't deer-hunting season now.

When Patrick drove up in his battered, mud-splotched Jeep, there was Judd anxiously waiting in the Ford pickup with the .22-caliber Winchester rifle, wrapped in a strip of canvas, on the passenger's seat beside him. Judd's heart lifted at the sight of his brother whom he hadn't seen for some time. If this was a test of Judd's loyalty and faith in Patrick, he knew he'd done well.

So far as Corinne knew, Judd was on an errand to a farm supply store in Eagleton Corners. Neither Corinne nor Michael Sr. had any idea that Patrick was anywhere near home.

Patrick slowed the Jeep but continued past the turnoff where the pickup was parked. Deftly turned in the road, and drove back to park close by Judd, facing the opposite direction. He swung open his door as Judd opened his but neither brother climbed out of his vehicle. In these quick confused seconds Judd had absorbed the significant fact that both the front and rear license plates of Patrick's Jeep were partly obscured by mud. “How's it going, kid?” Patrick asked. The voice was not Patrick's voice. From their many telephone conversations Judd had come to know Patrick's voice as intimately as his own but this voice, loud, aggressively cheerful, was not that voice. Chill sunshine fell from directly overhead through the Jeep's not-very-clean windshield and onto Patrick's pale, sharp-chiseled face. He looked older, scarcely recognizable. He was wearing wire-rimmed sunglasses so dark as to appear black and his jaws were covered in whiskers of approximately a week's growth. He was wearing an army fatigue jacket and his hair was completely hidden beneath a dark woolen cap pulled down low on his forehead. Judd stared, fascinated. “What's wrong, kid? Don't you know your old brother Pinch?” Patrick seemed pleased.

“You do look sort of different.”

“That's my intention.”

“Well. I brought the—what you wanted.”

“Great! Give it here.”

Stone Creek Road was empty of traffic in both directions, so far as Judd could see. He handed Patrick the rifle in its canvas wrapper and Patrick examined it on his lap, behind the steering wheel. He stroked the polished stock and drew his fingers slowly along the long slender barrel. He lifted the rifle to his shoulder, aimed it beyond Judd's head, frowning through the scope. Judd steeled himself preparing for Patrick to pull the trigger. Who knew if Mike's old rifle could even fire, after so many years? Judd hadn't dared to test it, himself. Patrick had said he didn't want the rifle fired, no evidence of recent use, if that could be avoided.

Weird: P.J. with a beard. How Mom would laugh. Though she'd say Patrick was handsome, too. Any new thing the brothers did, like Mike slicking his hair back oiled in high school, or P.J. getting his round wire-rimmed eyeglasses instead of those Mom had selected, she'd make a fuss initially, declaring she'd never get used to it, what an unsettling sight, then come around after a few days to marveling how handsome her sons were, after all. As if she'd made the choice, not them. And maybe she'd remember it, she
had
.

Watching Patrick, Judd began to recognize something. Those bristly brown whiskers. The tight-lipped expression. Patrick reminded him of one of those Hebrew prophets from their Sunday school Bible cards! They'd been given so many of them, as children, at one or another of the churches their mother had taken them to. Judd's favorite when he'd been a little boy was someone named Amos because on his card, in bright primer colors, Amos was tall, manly, sharp-eyed and fanatic in his bushy beard and herdsman's clothes and the caption beneath his picture was
The LORD will roar from Zion
.
Amos 1:2.

Judd was saying, “I was worried I wouldn't be able to locate the key to the cabinet but it was in the kitchen drawer, Mom had tagged it. ‘Cabinet, family room.' Just like Mom.”

Patrick didn't reply. He was examining the rifle like a finicky customer. He'd opened it, peering at the bullets; extracted a bullet to hold it to the light. Judd saw, or believed he saw, that his brother's hands shook slightly. Patrick said, “Did you bring any more bullets?”

Judd had forgotten: a box containing two dozen bullets, never opened, he'd found in one of the cabinet drawers. “Oh, yeah. Here.”

“I doubt I'll be using them, but—” Patrick smiled, taking the box from Judd, “—you never know. ‘Chance follows design' but not invariably.”

“‘Chance follows design'—what's that mean?”

“You make careful plans, and ‘chance' seems to favor you. Things go your way that look to a neutral observer like luck. But it's luck you've engineered.”

“That sounds good.”

“But not
invariably
. Because design can collapse, no matter how carefully it's been planned.”

Patrick shut up the rifle, covered it with the canvas and laid it on the seat beside him; put the box of bullets into the Jeep's glove compartment. His movements were brisk, methodical. He was preparing to drive away. They'd been together scarcely five minutes. Judd felt a stab of panic—wasn't there more to be said, explained?

He thought
If it's only a test it can end now.

Patrick named another out-of-the-way location, about equidistant from Mt. Ephraim and High Point Farm, where Judd could retrieve the rifle the next day. This was the old abandoned cemetery on Sandhill Road, surrounded by a crumbling stone wall where, at the rear, if you approached it from the rear, there was a niche the gun could be shoved into beneath the wall. Patrick said, “You'll be going to church with Mom? You won't be able to get away until later but pick up the gun as soon as you can. If there's any change of plans I'll try to call you. But it should be all over by then.”

How lightly
it
sounded on Patrick's tongue. But what did
it
mean, exactly?

Patrick lifted his dark glasses to look at Judd. His eyes were startling—not eyes that went with the beard but young eyes, quizzical and alert. “How's the sale of the farm coming along? Any luck?”

Judd shrugged. It was too painful to talk about somehow in the open air. “Mom says we can buy it back sometime. She says that at least once a day.”

“But is anyone interested in buying?”

“Sure, people are interested. A doctor and his family drove out from Yewville last week. If we're home, the realtor tries to keep out of our way. Usually we're not home. Mom makes it a point not to be home. So weird to see people you don't know, strangers, being shown…” Judd's voice trailed off,
weird
was so juvenile and inadequate a word to express what could not be expressed but only endured.

“How's Mom taking it?”

“She's all right. She's the one negotiating on the phone, mainly.”

“Does Marianne know yet?”

“She must know.”

“
I
didn't tell her.”

“Well, she must know. Mom's always saying Marianne should be ‘realistic.'”

“And Dad, what about Dad? He's ‘realistic'?”

“He's negotiating to move the business to Marsena, unless he's negotiating to file for bankruptcy. He isn't home much but when he is he's on the phone with lawyers.”

“Is he drinking, much? How's he behaving to Mom?”

Judd thought
What about to me?
—the other day, he'd asked his father please not to shout at his mother and his father had come close to striking him in the face. “Look, Patrick, drop by and see us sometime. It's only ninety miles from Ithaca, it isn't the dark side of the moon.”

Patrick looked away. He said, quietly, “Not just yet. Not for a while.”

“Yeah. You said.”

“I can't forgive them, for Marianne. Him, especially. It's never going to be the same again and Mike feels the same way. I was talking to him a couple of weeks ago—he feels the same way.”

“Marianne forgives them. She isn't even thinking of it.”

“Of course Marianne is thinking of it! Don't be ridiculous,” Patrick said irritably. “Marianne doesn't think of anything else.”

Judd said, suddenly angry, “I thought you said Dad and Mom were ‘casualties.' Why blame them for treating Marianne like shit if they're just—what's it?—frogs sucked to death by water spiders.”

“For the same reason Dad blames Marianne. You just have a gut feeling, you don't want to see too much of a person.”

“What about me? I live there.”

“You'll be leaving in a couple of years.”

“Going where?”

“To college. Anywhere.”

“But it's our
home
. It's where we
live
for Christ's sake.”

“Judd, what the hell are we talking about? What's wrong with you?”

Judd wiped at his eyes. He was losing Patrick, he couldn't help what he said. “I don't know what's wrong with me. I just don't want—any of of this. I wish—”

“Sure.” Patrick leaned over to touch Judd's arm. The touch was remarkable, as if it had materialized out of the very air. “Where do you and Mom go to church these days?”

“Just this little country church in Milford. Church of Christ Risen. They used to be Methodists but broke away for some reason. They're nice people, good people. Mom mostly sits in the pew at services and prays. She sings the hymns, really loud. Like she's happy, and it matters to show it. Sometimes she cries a little. A hymn like ‘Tell Me Why' can set her off. It's like she has a breakdown every Sunday morning, then blows her nose and smiles and we talk awhile to the minister and his wife and some others and I drive us back home and that's Sunday.”

“Well. Tomorrow's Easter.”

“Sunday of Sundays.”

Judd was going to ask Patrick about the knife, had he brought the knife, but he couldn't summon up the words. And at that moment Patrick leaned over to shake Judd's hand. His handshake was strong, frank, unhesitating but his fingers were cold. Judd smiled, taken by surprise. It was the first time either of his brothers had ever shaken hands with him.

They said good-bye. Turned their vehicles around to drive in opposite directions: Judd back to Eagleton Corners, Patrick to the far end of Stone Creek Road. Judd waved out the window at his rapidly departing brother. He wondered what Patrick would do between now and dark; between now and
it
. He told himself
It was a test
.
It is! And almost over.